gabrielgoh

(author here)

default values are the best guesses for the parameters of the novel coronavirus based on my reading of the literature

(author here) - that is correct, those aren't sliders, just waypoints

good questions! (author here)

I've had a hard time trying to find hard figures on these numbers, and am trying to steer as much from speculation as possible.

Your second observation is a very good one. This is true, e.g. for the default intervention. Adding initial infections has a similar effect to waiting, and delaying an intervention can have a tremendous effect (at least according to the model) on the course of the epidemic

See the literature on exact penalty methods. I believe the short of it is yes, for a large class of problems this works, but the new problem will not be necessarily easier to solve. In the case of the abs(.) function, the nonlinearity at 0 makes subgradient methods slow, and the large constant in front of the abs(.) might prove numerically unstable.

email them

I guess the author is not claiming a well rounded (low bias) introduction to ML to statistics, but a highly biased and specialized (low variance) course that is tailored to the author's own interests and tastes.

the illustration shows 4 an approximation with quadratic curves. There's no point drawing the one with 8 as it would be indistinguishable, as the article points out

I don't think so. This effect, at least as described, can change even as the phone remains static, e.g. if you head moves while the phone sits still on the table.

could you clarify what you mean by an open-loop system, and why it must be compared with a closed-loop one?

A simple example of this that has been shown rigorously is compressed sensing. Finding the sparsest vector, subject to linear constraints Ax = b is NP hard for general matrices, but is solvable in polynomial time if A satisfies the RIP property (e.g. w.h.p if A is generated by randomly sampling gaussians for each entry). Quite surprising!

is this a real concern? it should be relatively easy to distinguish life on earth from life on mars, should it exist. Especially considering it comes from a completely new path of evolution.

Furthermore, a mars station would allow science to be done directly on mars, rather than having payloads of material sent to and from earth.

they did experiments on the 2016 Max-SAT challenge, which seems to me like a legitimate class of problem instances.

i enjoyed the presentation, he has a flair for the dramatic.

could you elaborate on this point? what you're saying sounds like dynamic programming, which does not reduce the state space at all, just saves on redundant computations (and is a favourite of programming interviews everywhere)

When working over ssh, its handy to have a text editor for making small edits here and there. I'm very excited about this editor!